{"id":736944,"date":"2026-08-13T18:30:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T18:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/736944\/"},"modified":"2026-08-13T18:30:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T18:30:10","slug":"it-was-fun-to-get-pushed-around-andrew-rannells-on-razzle-dazzle-kissing-co-stars-and-being-a-better-friend-to-lena-dunham-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/736944\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It was fun to get pushed around\u2019: Andrew Rannells on \u2018razzle dazzle\u2019, kissing co-stars and being a better friend to Lena Dunham | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine a cute, young, gay Jim Carrey with a withering line in put-downs: that is Andrew Rannells. Or rather, it was, back when he starred in Lena Dunham\u2019s HBO series Girls<\/a> as Elijah, the formerly closeted ex of her character, Hannah. Dunham had seen Rannells playing Elder Price, the zealous missionary spreading the good word in the original 2011 Broadway production of the bad-taste musical The Book of Mormon<\/a>, for which he received a Tony nomination. Girls, in turn, spread the good word about him. To this day, fans still shout \u201cYour dad is gay!\u201d at him in the street, a call-back to the moment when Elijah tartly advises Hannah that she might want to fine-tune her gaydar.<\/p>\n

It is an older, gentler, salt-and-pepper-bearded Rannells who stars in the comedy-drama Miss You, Love You<\/a>. He plays Jamie, a personal assistant arriving in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to shepherd the spiky and recently widowed Diane (Allison Janney)<\/a> through the initial weeks after her husband\u2019s death from Parkinson\u2019s. As it dawns on them that Diane\u2019s son \u2013 Jamie\u2019s employer \u2013 may not make it to his stepfather\u2019s funeral, these strangers navigate their way through the grey area of their flung-together friendship.<\/p>\n

Initially, Jamie struggles to retain composure in the face of Diane\u2019s gale-force disdain, as she picks and pecks at his every word. \u201cI was just trying to keep up with what Allison was doing,\u201d says Rannells, who is wearing a silvery-grey shirt and running a hand through his chestnut quiff. He knew Janney from starring together in the comic thriller Another Simple Favor<\/a>, but nothing prepared him for being harangued by her during the new film\u2019s extended takes. \u201cShe is relentless. She goes and goes and goes. All her years on The West Wing really prepped her.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Watch the trailer for Miss You, Love You.<\/p>\n

Rannells is hardly low-energy himself. Whether in his impish US television appearances, collected in YouTube compilations with titles such as \u201candrew rannells being a little TOO ICONIC on talk shows<\/a>\u201d, or in his shopping-mall song-and-dance number as an incorrigible Juilliard graduate in Ryan Murphy\u2019s The Prom<\/a>, he is all razzle-dazzle. \u201cYeah, I\u2019m usually in that position,\u201d he concedes. \u201cIt was fun this time to be on the other side of it and to feel what it\u2019s like to get pushed around and bullied.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is a few weeks before his 48th birthday and Rannells is speaking on a video call from the home in Los Angeles he shares with the actor Tuc Watkins<\/a> and the latter\u2019s twin teenage children. The room behind him is blurred, so it is impossible to identify the three paintings on the wall, but since Rannells put his stylish Manhattan apartment on the market last year for nearly $2.5m (\u00a31.8m), Dogs Playing Poker is unlikely to be among them.<\/p>\n

He and Watkins met on the 2018 Broadway revival of the pre-Stonewall chamber-piece The Boys in the Band<\/a>. Their first kiss was in character. \u201cWe would end each show making out on stage. Ten minutes of us rolling around while Jim Parsons was crying.\u201d They hooked up but didn\u2019t start dating until a year later, when the cast reconvened for Murphy\u2019s Netflix version<\/a>. \u201cWe turned a showmance into a relationship,\u201d he says with a little twitch of the eyebrow.<\/p>\n

Withering put-downs \u2026 Rannells and Lena Dunham in Girls, 2017. Photograph: Apatow Productions\/Kobal\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

Given his success, it is natural to assume that Rannells\u2019 performance as Jamie in Miss You, Love You was based on his own experience of having PAs. On the contrary, he says \u2013 he has never hired one. This may make him something of an outlier in Hollywood. \u201cOne of my closest friends has an assistant. At times, I\u2019m closer to the assistant than I am to him.\u201d Why has Rannells resisted? \u201cMaybe it comes from years of working in theatre. I got in the habit of doing things for myself. To relinquish that control now would be, I think, hard for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Knowing when and how to ask for help is one of the lessons that Jamie must learn in the film. Rannells can sympathise. \u201cYou are raised in the midwest to take care of your own problems: don\u2019t make waves, fix it, move on. Sometimes I do myself a disservice by not asking for what I need. I\u2019m getting better at it. But I\u2019ve certainly seen it abused. A lot of actors take advantage of people and I don\u2019t want to be that person.\u201d<\/p>\n

He grew up next door to a children\u2019s theatre in Omaha, Nebraska, and took drama classes from a young age. Performing soon began to pay: from 13 to 31, he was a prolific voice actor in cartoons including Pok\u00e9mon and Yu-Gi-Oh!. That spilled over into his burgeoning stage career: at 21, he toured the US in Pok\u00e9mon Live!. \u201cIn retrospect, [I] would rather have done a snuff film or porn,\u201d he said later.<\/p>\n

His big, gay New York life was under way by then. He came out to his parents shortly before leaving home to study drama at 19. \u201cMy family was mostly \u2013 what\u2019s the best way to say this? \u2013 not shocked,\u201d he wrote in Too Much Is Not Enough: A Memoir of Fumbling Toward Adulthood. That 2019 book also revealed, in a chapter entitled It\u2019s Never the Priest You Want to Kiss, that he had been sexually assaulted as a teenager by a Catholic priest.<\/p>\n

The boys in the band \u2026 (from left) Zachary Quinto, Andrew Rannells, Matt Bomer and Jim Parsons at the 2018 Tony awards in New York. Photograph: Kevin Mazur\/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mum accepted my sexuality,\u201d he says. \u201cMy dad said: \u2018I don\u2019t think you have to be this way, but I love you.\u2019 I was like: \u2018Eh, that\u2019s not exactly what I wanted to hear, but whatever.\u2019\u201d A few months later, his father reached a different conclusion. \u201cHe said: \u2018I realise you\u2019ve always been this way and I\u2019m sorry I said that.\u2019\u201d Hadn\u2019t his dad introduced him to 1940s musicals from a young age? \u201cExactly! It was his fault.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coming out was relatively plain sailing, but there was a crisis ahead. When Rannells was 22, he brought a date back to his apartment. In the bathroom later, he checked the phone messages he had been ignoring for the previous few hours and found that his family had been frantically trying to reach him. His father was in a coma; a few days later, he died.<\/p>\n

That night, with its intermingling of sex, intimacy and mortality, left an impression on Rannells. In 2017, he wrote about the awkwardness of being consoled in this devastating moment by a naked man he hardly knew: \u201cAfter I hung up, he tried to hug me: \u2018What happened?\u2019 I wanted to shout: \u2018Clearly nothing good! Put on some pants!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

That essay inspired him to write and direct How Do You Remember Me?, his half-hour contribution to the Amazon series Modern Love<\/a>. In the screen version, he highlights the disparity that exists between separate recollections of identical events. \u201cI\u2019m sure that guy has gone off and told that story, especially as I\u2019ve become successful,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I\u2019m sure it\u2019s mostly the same as mine \u2013 but also pretty different.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gale-force disdain \u2026 Rannells and Allison Janney in Miss You, Love You. Photograph: HBO<\/p>\n

Rannells had his own experience of seeing the familiar from a revealing new angle when he read Dunham\u2019s recent memoir, Famesick<\/a>. Its tales of behind-the-scenes horrors on Girls include the allegedly hostile behaviour of Adam Driver<\/a>, who Dunham claims berated her for forgetting her lines before hurling a chair at the wall next to her. \u201cThat book is a great example of seeing things differently,\u201d Rannells says. \u201cGirls was my first TV job and when I showed up on set I saw the fun, exciting part. At times, Lena would open up to me and I\u2019d read things in the press that were untrue or unfair. But the book was hard to read as someone who is close to her now. I felt terrible that I wasn\u2019t a better friend.\u201d<\/p>\n

What could he have done? \u201cBeen more available. I let a lot of shit slide because so much was happening. I had a break-up, then a new relationship. I was doing The Book of Mormon eight times a week and working on Girls.\u201d He left to shoot 22 episodes of Murphy\u2019s 2012 gay-dads sitcom, The New Normal<\/a>, before returning to Girls when The New Normal was cancelled. \u201cOf course, there was another part of reading her book,\u201d he says. \u201cI was, like: \u2018Why didn\u2019t she talk about me more?\u2019\u201d Joking he might be, but there is a Reddit thread on that very topic. \u201cI would like to say I started that thread, but I did not,\u201d he says. The eyebrow twitches again. Did he or didn\u2019t he? As ever with Rannells, you are left with a tantalising question mark.<\/p>\n

Miss You, Love You is on HBO Max in the UK and Ireland, the US and Australia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Imagine a cute, young, gay Jim Carrey with a withering line in put-downs: that is Andrew Rannells. Or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":736945,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-736944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=736944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736944\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/736945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=736944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=736944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=736944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}